Sam Wang (neuroscientist)

Early life

Wang was raised in Riverside, California. His parents emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the 1960s. He attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated in 1986 with a B.S. in physics with honors at the age of 19, making him the youngest member of his graduating class. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Stanford University.

Career

After receiving his Ph.D., Wang worked at Duke University as a postdoctoral fellow, for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, and as a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There, he used pulsed lasers and two-photon microscopy to study brain signaling, before coming to Princeton as an Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology.

In 2006, Wang became an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton University; in 2015, he was promoted to Professor. His current research program addresses learning and plasticity in the brain, with a focus on the cerebellum, a major brain structure that processes sensory information, and guides movement and cognitive/emotional processing. He has a major interest in autism, a disorder often correlated with disruption of the cerebellum's structure.

Wang has published over sixty articles on the brain in leading scientific journals and has received numerous awards. He gives public lectures on a regular basis and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Fox News Channel.

Wang has been widely honored for his scholarship and his advances in neuroscience. He has received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Rita Allen Foundation Young Scholars Fellowship, a Distinguished Young Investigator Award from the W. M. Keck Foundation, and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. He was also selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. In 2015, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed him to the Governor’s Council for Medical Research and the Treatment of Autism.

Election Predictions

In 2004, Wang was among the first to aggregate US Presidential polls using probabilistic methods. The method's applications included correct Election-Eve predictions, high-resolution tracking of the race during the campaign, and identification of targets for resource allocation. Wang's calculation missed the final result by a wide margin, as he predicted that John Kerry would defeat George W. Bush by 311-227 in the electoral college, corresponding to a 98% probability of a Kerry victory. One of his alternate models did precisely predict the actual electoral outcome: Bush 286, Kerry 252.

In 2008, Wang and Andrew Ferguson founded the Princeton Election Consortium blog, which analyzes U.S. national election polling. His statistical analysis in 2012 correctly predicted the presidential vote outcome in 49 of 50 states and even the popular vote outcome of Barack Obama's 51.1% to Mitt Romney's 48.9%. That year, the Princeton Election Consortium also correctly called 10 out of 10 close Senate races and came within a few seats of the final House outcome.

In 2016, PEC predicted both a 93% chance of Clinton victory in one model, and a greater than 99% chance of a Clinton victory in his Bayesian model, as seen in Wang's election morning blog post titled "Final Projections: Clinton 323 EV, 51 Democratic Senate seats, GOP House". There was a dispute in the forecasting world about how to interpret the pre-election polls. Wang believed that the polls were reliable and errors were unlikely to be correlated. Friendly rival Nate Silver predicted a much more chaotic election: he pointed to the comparatively large number of undecided voters in 2016 vs. 2012, and believed that errors in state-level polling would likely be correlated (e.g. if one state's true vote favored a candidate by 2 points compared to the polling estimate, it is likely that many other states will also favor the same candidate by around 2 points). Clinton narrowly lost the 2016 election, and Wang said that "In addition to the enormous polling error, I did not correctly estimate the size of the correlated error – by a factor of five." In response to Trump's victory, Wang subsequently ate a cricket on CNN, fulfilling a promise that he would "eat a bug" if Trump won more than 240 electoral votes.

Books

Wang’s first book, Welcome To Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How To Drive, was a best-seller. It was named 2009 Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been translated into more than 20 languages. His second book, Welcome To Your Child's Brain: How The Mind Develops From Conception To College, has been translated into 15 languages. Both books were co-authored by Dr. Sandra Aamodt.

Personal life

Wang and his wife, a physician, live in Princeton, New Jersey with their daughter.